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Radeon HD 6970 vs Radeon HD 7950

Intro

The Radeon HD 6970 uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7950, which features GPU clock speed of 800 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1250 MHz through a 384-bit bus. It also features 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7950

200 Watts

Radeon HD 6970

250 Watts

Difference: 50 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7950 should be 36% faster than the Radeon HD 6970 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950

240000 MB/sec

Radeon HD 6970

176000 MB/sec

Difference: 64000 (36%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7950 is a bit (about 6%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6970. (explain)

Radeon HD 7950

89600 Mtexels/sec

Radeon HD 6970

84480 Mtexels/sec

Difference: 5120 (6%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the Radeon HD 7950, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970

28160 Mpixels/sec

Radeon HD 7950

25600 Mpixels/sec

Difference: 2560 (10%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Radeon HD 6970

Amazon.com

Radeon HD 7950

Amazon.com

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

Model

Radeon HD 6970

Radeon HD 7950

Manufacturer

AMD

AMD

Year

December 2010

January 2012

Code Name

Cayman XT

Tahiti Pro

Fab Process

40 nm

28 nm

Bus

PCIe x16

PCIe 3.0 x16

Memory

2048 MB

1536 MB

Core Speed

880 MHz

800 MHz

Shader Speed

N/A MHz

(N/A) MHz

Memory Speed

1375 MHz (5500 MHz effective)

1250 MHz (5000 MHz effective)

Unified Shaders

1536

1792

Texture Mapping Units

96

112

Render Output Units

32

32

Bus Type

GDDR5

GDDR5

Bus Width

256-bit

384-bit

DirectX Version

DirectX 11

DirectX 11.1

OpenGL Version

OpenGL 4.1

OpenGL 4.2

Power (Max TDP)

250 watts

200 watts

Shader Model

5.0

5.0

Bandwidth

176000 MB/sec

240000 MB/sec

Texel Rate

84480 Mtexels/sec

89600 Mtexels/sec

Pixel Rate

28160 Mpixels/sec

25600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead.
The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image).
The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.